Tara Donovan and Rachel Whiteread are among the world's finest sculptors. It is uplifting to note that these two women (working in a traditionally male-dominated field) both have solo shows in Boston's world class museums. Whiteread, the first woman to win the Turner Prize, is exhibiting Place (Village) at the Museum of Fine Arts. It is a collection of over 200 dollhouses that she has purchased over the years on eBay and secondhand shops.......

......

A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory Institute of Contemporary Art South Boston Saturday-Sunday Tickets and more information. Esther Robinson is an accidental film director. A chance meeting at the Andy Warhol Foundation led her to discover a cache of 20 films directed by her uncle, Danny Williams, whom she had never met. Williams had been a fixture at Andy Warhol's Factory, making experimental films about Factory habitués, including Edie Sedgwick......

On Sunday, the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music's last pair of concerts at the ICA began with two people and finished with over sixty, in a glass box on the harbor. The former were Matt Haimovitz, on cello, and Geoff Burleson, on (and in) piano. Children standing on the postmodern boardwalk outside pressed their faces against the window as Burleson hit keys with one hand and reached in with the other to pluck at the......

Friday night's installment of the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music was all about text. Whole, grammatical sentences; comprehensible, English, (mostly) well-enunciated; no Italian arias, no liturgical Latin, no repurposed Sanskrit, neither Einstein nor beach—this is not what Bostonist has come to expect from classical music, contemporary or otherwise. And Bostonist has never seen a tenor struggle to maintain a straight face, but Frank Kelley very nearly succumbed during Richard Beaudoin's "Eunoia Songs" (2004), a clever......

Firebird Ensemble, based in Somerville and outfitted like an accomplished H&M ad in black and red and sparkling knitwear, opened the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music on Thursday night. They began with a darkly animated piece that sounded like a fit night of half-sleep in a bed of swaying strings, heckled by lonely trills of from a flute and the footsteps of a piano that approached like a serial killer. Never has sudden bongoing sounded......

Sam Rivers Trio and NEC Jazz Orchestra New Music Now series Institute for Contemporary Art South Boston, 7:30 p.m. $25/$20 It's almost perverse to include an 84-year-old man in a series called New Music Now, but Sam Rivers isn't your average octogenarian. The reedsman, who has played jazz since the 1950s, is a living repository of free jazz, a performer whose recordings over the past two decades have become essential listening for those interested in......

dberrange checked out one of the ICA's "Art on the Harbor Islands" installations. We like how the grainy black and white image is concurrently simple and complex, while giving us a peak at something many most likely don't know is even there.......

Last Thursday, the soft light of dusk lingered in the theatre at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, where floor-to-ceiling windows let you see the Boston Harbor from two sides. Yachts, Harbor Cruisers, and sailboats passed in the distance, backgrounded by the Logan airport control tower on one side and the Custom House clock tower on the other. In the middle of the room, on an oriental rug spread across the hardwood floor, a set of......

--Meet the allegedly worst colleague ever: Revere police officer Evan Franklin may be fired because he is accused of running away after Officer Dan Talbot was shot in the head and killed behind Revere High School. He is also accused of lying to investigators after the incident. The officers were off-duty but had been drinking before the incident. [WBZ, background: Bostonist] --Yesterday, a fire broke out in a Brookline home on Harrison Street, and......

New Music Now Thursday, April 17 and Friday, April 18 Institute of Contemporary Art South Boston Tickets and more information. John Zorn is famous and weird enough that, when he was awarded the MacArthur "genius" grant, The Colbert Report made a joke. Sort of "my kid can paint modern art," except with saxophone reeds and adults. Zorn's music is challenging, to be sure, but anybody looking for wall-to-wall noise might be disappointed by his newer......

RoseLee Goldberg Reflecting Spectacle: Life as Art A panel discussion Institute of Contemporary Art Tuesday, March 4, 6:30 pm $12/$8 More information RoseLee Goldberg wrote the book on performance art. Her text Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, has seen three editions and been translated into seven languages. It's a mainstay on art history syllabi and one of the first attempts to see performance as an organic part of artistic......

The World as a Stage Institute of Contemporary Art Feb 1 - April 27 The centerpiece of the new exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art is an enormous set of crescent-shaped bleachers that curve around the gallery space like outstretched arms. They are pressed board and synthetic fiber and would resemble gym bleachers if basketball were played in the round and gyms were designed by Gene Roddenberry. Rita McBride's Arena (1997) establishes the dual......

Waking up to an everyday landscape purified and made strange by snow on the day after seeing DJ Spooky’s Subliminal Strings: Nature Morte musical performance was a perfect reflection of the concert itself. Starting out with a familiar, instrument-based backdrop, Spooky built an electronic scaffolding on top that both complemented the more traditional sounds and allowed them to become even more breathtaking. While built on recognizable notes and tonal systems, the conversational interchange of Spooky’s......

Flickr user Ed Karjala caught our eye with this outstanding shot of the ICA. We love the odd green tones (which are rendered richer through the glass), and the angle gives a unique perspective of the new Institute of Contemporary Art building. One of our favorite details is how the Boston skyline is reflected in the glass, adding another dimension to the photo. We also require that you view this amazing shot of the......